Some time in 2013, I helped out at a Software Carpentry event at The University of Bath. As with most software carpentry boot camps, one of the topics covered was shell scripting and the scripting language of choice was bash. As I wandered around the room, I asked the delegates which operating system they use for the majority of their research and the most popular answer, by far, was Windows.

This led me to wonder if we should teach using a native Windows solution rather than relying on bash?

A few years ago, this would be an insane proposition since the Windows command shell is very weak compared to bash. PowerShell, on the other hand, is modern, powerful and installed on all modern Windows operating systems by default.

I got close to completing this exercise last summer but various things took higher priority and so the project languished. Rather than sit on the notes any longer, I’ve decided to just publish what I have so far in case they are useful to anyone.

You are free to use them with the following caveats

This is not necessarily the right way to teach PowerShell. It is an experiment in converting some classroom-tested Linux based notes to PowerShell.

These notes have been developed and tested on Windows 7. Behaviour may be different using different versions of Windows.

These notes are given as they were left sometime in mid 2013. Some things may be out of date.

I was learning PowerShell as I developed these notes. As such, I fully expect them to be full of mistakes. Corrections and improvements would be welcomed.

If anyone is interested in developing these notes into something that’s classroom-ready, contact me.

The old Windows Command Shell

The traditional Windows command shell is a program called cmd.exe which can trace its roots all the way back to the old, pre-Windows DOS prompt.

You can launch this command shell as follows

Hold down both the Windows button and the letter R to open the Run prompt

Type cmd and press Enter or click OK

You should see a window similar to the one below

The Windows command shell hasn’t changed significantly for over twenty years and is relatively feature poor compared to more modern shells. For this reason, it is recommended that you use Windows PowerShell instead. Mention of cmd.exe is only included here since, despite its deficiencies, it is still widely in use

PowerShell

To launch PowerShell:

Hold down both the Windows button and the letter R to open the Run prompt

Type powershell and press Enter or click OK

You should see a window similar to the one below

Note that although the header of the above window mentions v1.0, it could be a screenshot from either version 1.0 or version 2.0. This is a well-known bug. If you are using Windows 7 you will have version 2 at the minimum.

PowerShell versions

At the time of writing, PowerShell is at version 3. Ideally, you should at least have version 2.0 installed. To check version:

Different command types in PowerShell: Aliases, Functions and Cmdlets

Many of the PowerShell ‘commands’ we’ve used so far are actually aliases to Powershell Cmdlets which have a Verb-Noun naming convention. We can discover what each command is an alias of using the get-alias cmdlet.

Now we can clearly see that mkdir is a PowerShell function. The mkdir.exe is an Application which you’ll only see if you installed git for windows as I have.

Cmdlets

A Cmdlet (pronounced ‘command-let’) is a .NET class but you don’t need to worry abut what this means until you get into advanced PowerShell usage. Just think of Cmdlets as the base type of PowerShell command. They are always named according to the convention verb-noun; for example Set-Location and Get-ChildItem.

Listing all Cmdlets

The following lists all Cmdlets

Get-Command

You can pipe this list to a pager

Get-Command | more

Getting help

You can get help on any PowerShell command using the -? switch. For example

ls -?

When you do this, you’ll get help for the Get-ChildItem Cmdlet which would be confusing if you didn’t know that ls is actually an alias for Get-ChildItem

History

Up arrow browses previous commands.

By default, PowerShell version 2 remembers the last 64 commands whereas PowerShell version 3 remembers 4096. This number is controlled by the $MaximumHistoryCount variable

PS > $MaximumHistoryCount #Display the current value
PS > $MaximumHistoryCount=150 #Change it to 150
PS > history #Display recent history using the alias version of the command
PS > get-history #Display recent history using the Cmdlet direct

Although it remembers more, PowerShell only shows the last 32 commands by default. To see a different number, use the count switch

PS > get-history -count 50

To run the Nth command in the history use Invoke-History

PS > invoke-history 7

Word count (and more) using Measure-Object

Linux has a command called wc that counts the number of lines and words in a file. Powershell has no such command but we can do something similar with the Measure-Object Cmdlet.

Say we want to count the number of lines, words and characters in the file foo.txt. The first step is to get the content of the file

get-content foo.txt # gets the content of foo.txt

Next, we pipe the result of the get-content Cmdlet to Measure-Object, requesting lines, words and characters

get-content foo.txt | measure-object -line -character -word

The measure-object Cmdlet can also count files

ls *.txt | measure-object #Counts number of .txt files in the current folder

When you execute the above command, a table of results will be returned:

Count : 3
Average :
Sum :
Maximum :
Minimum :
Property :

This is because the measure-object Cmdlet, like all PowerShell Cmdlets, actually returns an object and the above table is the textual representation of that object.

The fields in this table hint that measure-object can do a lot more than simply count things. For example, here we find some statistics concerning the file lengths found by the ls *.txt command

Sometimes, you’ll want to simply return the numerical value of an object’s property and you do this using the select-object Cmdlet. Here we ask for just the Count property of the GenericMeasureInfo object returned by measure-object.

#Counts the number of *.txt files and returns just the numerical result
ls *.txt | measure-object | select-object -expand Count

Searching within files

The Unix world has grep, PowerShell has Select String. Try running the following on haiku.txt

Alternatively, we could have asked for each element’s type using the For-Each-Object Cmdlet to loop over every object in the array.

$mymatches | Foreach-Object {$_.gettype().Name}

Where $_ is a special variable that effectively means ‘current object’ or ‘The object currently being considered by Foreach-Object’ if you want to be more verbose.

So, we know that we have an array of 2 MatchInfo objects in our variable mymatches. What does this mean? What properties do MatchInfo objects have? We can find out by piping one of them to the Get-Member Cmdlet.

Input and output redirection

> redirects output (AKA standard output). This works in both Bash and Powershell scripts. For example, in Bash we might do

#BASH
grep -r not * > found_nots.txt

Drawing on what we’ve learned so far, you might write the PowerShell version of this command as

#PS
get-childitem *.txt -recurse | select-string not > found_nots.txt

However, if you do this, you will find that the script will run forever with the hard-disk chugging like crazy. If you’ve run the above command, CTRL and C will stop it. This is because Powershell is including the output file, found_nots.txt, in its input which leads to an infinite loop. To prevent this, we must explicitly exclude the output file from the get-childitem search

This modification to PATH will only last as long as the current session. It is possible to permanently modify the system PATH but this should only be done with extreme care and is not covered here.

PowerShell Profile

The PowerShell profile is a script that is executed whenever you launch a new session. Every user has their own profile. The location of your PowerShell profile is defined by the variable $profile

$profile

Open it with

notepad $profile

Add something to it such as

echo "Welcome to PowerShell. This is a message from your profile"

Restart PowerShell and you should see the message. You can use this profile to customise your PowerShell sessions. For example, if you have installed NotePad++, you might find adding the following function to your PowerShell Profile to be useful.

Packaging

There are no direct PowerShell equivalents to zip, unzip, tar etc. There are write-zip, write-tar and write-gzip cmdlets in the third party, free PowerShell Community Extensions but I have not investigated them yet.

Transcripts

Start-transcript Initializes a transcript file which records all subsequent input/Output. Use the following syntax: